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a man in that situation expected to lay with?
    Still, there was no reasoning on the subject with Sadie, especially when Wyatt brought up the fact that women in the theatrical profession were looked down upon in a similar way, which only sent her flying.
    So Wyatt had simply said that the woman who came by was “Katherine Cummings,” which was actually Kate’s married name via the drunkard blacksmith in Colorado.
    “She’s a friend of Bat’s,” Wyatt had said offhandedly.
    Sadie had a mixed opinion of Masterson, the negative deriving from Wyatt and Bat’s friendship predating her own tenure, the positive from Bat becoming a successful New York sportswriter.
    “And why does that mean she has to come around here?” Sadie asked sharply, sitting in the rocker where earlier that day Kate’s behind had rested. By now evening had come, with Wyatt and his wife drinking glasses of warm beer in the cool blue night.
    “Bat has a job for me,” Wyatt told her.

    “What kind of job?”
    “A detective job. Young friend of his out there is getting some trouble from these Prohibition gangsters.”
    Her eyes tightened and she looked at her husband as if he had gone dancing around the little porch jaybird naked.
    “Why does Bat Masterson have to send all the way across the country,” she asked, “to get that kind of help? Don’t they have younger detectives in New York City?”
    “Yes,” Wyatt said, “but not any Bat trusts. He is paying full expenses and there should be several hundred in it.”
    Sadie’s eyes tightened again, but in a different way; then they untightened and her chin crinkled. “I don’t care if it’s five hundred…”
    Wyatt managed not to blink at her prescience.
    “…it sounds dangerous , and I don’t want you doing it.”
    He grunted a laugh. “Practically no danger in it a’tall.”
    “You know this for a certainty, Wyatt?”
    He patted the air with a dismissive palm. “Hell, I’ve been in one hundred tighter places.”
    She frowned and rocked. “I know, but you never can tell—this might be the time.”
    “What time?”
    “The time when one of those bullets catches up with you.”
    “…Sadie, it’s a chance to see Bat again.”
    “You saw him, when? Just last year, when you and he worked that prizefight in Ohio!” She stopped rocking and trained those brown eyes on him like the barrel ends of twin revolvers.
    “Anyway, you don’t belong to Bat Masterson. And Doc’s long dead, and you belong to me now, and I don’t want anything to happen to you.”
    Managing not to react to her mind-reader’s mention of Doc, he got up out of his hard chair and gave her a kiss on the mouth. She was still awfully pretty, especially in this light. And she could still dance a mean hornpipe.
    “You think that kiss’ll buy me off, Wyatt Earp?”
    “It had better. I have no money to try.”
    She had laughed and swatted him, and he had walked back to his chair with several hundred dollars crinkling in his left boot as he did.
    “Expenses paid?” she asked.

    “All the way and back again.”
    And on this Kate Elder had certainly not stinted—Wyatt was traveling first class and, on the designated Pullman car, he settled into his seat by the window, hat in his lap, knowing that the ride out of Los Angeles would initially be a rough one, the tracks running right down Alameda and playing tag with trolleys and horse-drawn wagons and trucks and automobiles.
    Before long, though, the bustle of the city had been replaced by orange groves whose pleasant perfume wafted through the car, helped by the battery of high-mounted electric fans.
    That afternoon he watched Arizona roll by the window in all its scruffy glory. Wyatt had never thought of this country as a barren expanse, particularly not this time of year, when the tans of sandy desert were broken by blossoms, the golden poppies and varicolored mariposa mingling with the green of shrubs and cacti. He was at home in Arizona’s desert, but knew